If your image of Free School primary is a preppy-style place in a leafy suburb where well-to-do parents send their children so they didn’t have to mix with the local council estate bunch , you couldn’t be farther from the truth, as the Free Schools being set up all over the Black County by a very technology minded secondary school illustrates.
Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust doesn’t sit in the shires at all, but in the rather bleak post industrial landscape of Smethwick, in the Sandwell borough of the West Midlands. It is the only outstanding secondary left in this very deprived local authority area and has set its face against much of the educational norms of the Govian era.
Rather than follow the academic curriculum beloved of the Conservative government and characterised by the EBACC, it is has made Design and Technology a compulsory subject for all students , has invested heavily in ICT and engineering technology and pioneered new forms of teaching and learning, such as Flipped Learning, throughout the curriculum.
It’s this technological focus in learning, which they believe can give their largely working class children the edge in the world outside the school, that has pushed the Shireland into a very ambitious Free School project.
Three Free Schools are proposed to be built in the Coseley, Willenhall and Darlaston Black Country towns and could be open as soon as September 2018.They will accompany the new Shireland High Tech Primary, which is also going to be run by the trust in Smethwick. The idea is that the technology and project-based teaching and learning they have pioneered at Shireland, will help children from these new schools transition more fluently. It’s vertical integration with a hi-tech ethos driving it.
Kirsty Tonks, formerly the Assistant Principal at Shireland Collegiate Academy, is going to be the new Director of Learning for the Free Schools and is one of main architects of the project.